Gariot Louima

I wrote "mario and the women" during my senior year at the Univ. of Miami

We were fighting again over the child.

Again, Nelina refused to answer the accusation.

"Is the boy for me, I asked? People are saying things about me in the streets."

But she'd sit and look at me. Other times she'd start to cry, or she'd get angry and curse at me. But this time, she just looked up at me like she had been beat up, Paul in her bosom, sucking the tit.

He was pink with soft brown hair and bright, shining eyes, and a pink mouth that never closed: always crying, always eating, always sucking a thumb or finger.

When my mother came from Haiti after he was born, she was enamored by him.

Se on belgason, no?

She kissed him and hugged him and cuddled him.
She stayed with us for two weeks, helping with Marie-Louise, the older child, while Nelina got better--the pregnancy was not easy for her.

But when Nelina went back to work, things changed.

Who you working for?

Mr. Charles on Fox Hill.

Mrs. Charles don't mind a pretty bright girl cleaning for her husband.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles divorced, Manman. He said I could stay and work because he knows things can be hard. Mr. Charles is good people.

I remember my mother's expression changed just then.

Nelina was sitting on the bed with Paul while Marie-Louise and I were on the floor, across the room, working on a doll house. Nesha, my sister, was there too, she had been there to visit our mother, and to help with the baby. She was sitting next to Nelina on the couch.

Manman leaned herself over Nelina. She lifted the baby out of Nelina's arms.

Beautiful skin, like you. All that hair. Looks like the baby didn't take anything from my people, eh, Mario?

I laughed uneasily because I had a feeling where my mother was taking this. It always surprised her that a Joissaint had chosen to spend her life with one of us. They had always thought themselves better, she liked to say.

Se on belgason, no? The boy is handsome. Not like you though, Mario. Where'd that face come from?

Nelina raised her arms to receive her baby. Mario, me and the baby need sleep.

And me too, mummy?

Yes, and Marie-Louise, too.

Manman gave me one of her looks. I laughed uneasily. She handed the baby back to Nelina.

Paul, no one in my family go by that name.

Mr. Charles' name is Paul. He did so much for us. He even found Mario the job at the hotel.

Like I said, nobody in my family by that name.

We left the house. Only just out of earshot from the open front door where Nelina stood, Manman told Nesha and I that the child was not mine.

Women like Nelina Joissaint always slip out. They thought they were men. And they slept around like men.

I made a feeble attempt to protect her: Nelina is not like those women.

Nesha tried too: She's a good girl, Manman.

When you found her, Mario, she was not at her father's house. She had one baby, and the baby's father, people say she got him deported so she could place with you. You took that girl from another man. Now a white man has already had her. And even a white man is not going to place with a loose milat.

And that night when I brought it up again, when we were alone in the house, Nelina would not cry. The accusation hit her, I could see that it hurt her, but she would not give me the satisfaction she thought I was looking for.

"Manman said the baby looks white, Nelly," I said. We were living in the green house, only two blocks from the old courtyard that she lived in when Nesha introduced us. The house was small, and it sat on the edge of a piece of property owned by an old Bahamian woman who was living with a Haitian man.

Nelina and I were in the living room, she on the floor with Marie-Louise asleep a few feet away from her and Paul crawling on the floor between her outstretched legs.

"You think I slept with a white man, Mario? If you thing that, Mario, why are you still here. I'm tired of telling you, and telling Nesha when she calls from Miami, and telling your mother when she sends cassettes." She rolled her eyes--her way of dismissing me--and she sucked her teeth, ending the conversation. She turned her attention down to Paul, and began speaking to him in his own baby language.

"I'm going to finish playing with Paul. Then I'm going to bed. If you want, you can come. If not, go sleep wherever it is you go to when you think I'm sleeping at night."

That night was cold when I stepped out. Nelina had taken Paul to bed with her. I carried Marie-Louise to her bedroom and covered her up with a bed sheet.

I was not going far away. I zipped my jacket up in the front and walked the few feet out of our yard to the pavement of the street.

Nassau was a strange phenomenon at night, the street was cleat and dark. The air smelled like rotting fish. I always thought we lived too close to the docks. Even with this minor nuisance, it reminded me so much of home.

There were lights on in some of the apartments and shabby houses that lined the road. Groups of Bahamian boys walked past me as I went. We acknowledged each other with a nod of our heads. I kept my hands in the pockets of my jackets. If you keep your hands in your pockets, a friend once told me, they think you have a knife, or even better, they think you have a gun.

I reached my destination in about then minutes. The house was small--a little shack on the corner, across from the old courtyard. The building was rundown on the outside, a decrepit white shack with wooden windows that were still flung open. She was waiting for me.

Before I got to the door, Carmen pushed it open. She stood in the doorway wearing a long yellow mumu. In the dark of the night, it was hard to see the features of her black face, her broad nose, high cheekbones, thick lips.

Her long black hair hung limply over her shoulder, the right one. The left shoulder remained naked, the sleeve of the mumu hung there around her arm.

"I thought you weren't coming tonight," she said.

"It doesn't matter you know," I said.

I inhaled her hot breath. She had been eating chicken. Drinking wine.

"Why doesn't it matter?" She pulled me inside and shut the door. As she waited for my response, she pushed my jacket to the ground and began pulling my shirt out of my pants.

"She knows, you know. She knows I'm coming to see someone when I go out. Nelina won't take this for long, you know?"

She paused for a moment and stared at me. I suppose she was waiting for me to tell her it was over, to tell her that Nelly and I were together and she could not be my other woman.

"You going to marry that Joissaint girl?"

"I didn't say anything about marriage."

"So why are you telling me she knows, Mario? She knows you been coming here since she was getting beat by Divano in that apartment? Huh?"

"Maybe. I'll just go home then. "

You see, Mario, that's why me and you aren't living together now. You get mad so easy. Come cheri. I get so lonely, that's all. I get so lonely while you go to her. And I only get to see you when she put you on the sofa, or when you slip away from her. I'm sorry.

She kissed my hand, my chest, the corner of my mouth. Then she led me to the back room, where she slept.

"You stay all night, this time, Mario?"

She kissed my navel as I lay back on her bed.

"What if I give you a reason?"

She kissed me where her lips had never been before. I closed my eyes. She did her work.

My mother was not the only person who believed Nelina had been unfaithful to me. Nesha began to believe the rumors too. She said there was no doubt in her mind. She knew her cousin.

"Her father, my father, the same people," she said. It hadn't taken long for her to be convinced. It was only a day after our mother accused Nelina to her face. They had both decided that they'd spend the rest of their visit at a cousin's house.

"Listen," she said. "Our family is not like Manman's side. The Joissaint blood is loose and dirty, Mario. You remember my father. He came when he needed to lay, and he left when he was finished. He never even looked at me like his own."

"That's why you put me with her?" Her reasoning didn't make sense to me.

"No, Marion, Nelly could have been a good girl. I thought the child was different. Now, she has too babies, but has never been married. And did you hear about her sister's child? The girl was only 15 and she was sleeping with a woman's husband and they tried to cut her with a machete. Now she is in Freeport and already she has another man." Nesha shook her head.

"You can't just put people in groups like that, Nesha. You can't just say things like that. I know Nelly. She's not like what people are saying. And they only talk because of what she looks like. If she didn't have all that color, she wouldn't be something so hot on people's tongues."

"What did she say when you asked her about it, Mario?"

I didn't answer her.

"I know, she didn't say a word, because she is too good to answer," Nesha said. She stood up, straightened out the skirt of her dress. "That's okay. That's it then. I go back to Miami the day after tomorrow."

I stood up and kissed her cheek.

"Come see me before I leave okay, ti fwe," she said.

"Ti fwe?" I laughed, "I'm older than you, girl".

"Yeah, but your shorter."

Carmen knelt before me on the floor and laced her fingers in mine.

"I can't live like this anymore," she said. "One minute you say you want me, and the next minute you say your never going to come back because you love her".

She put her head back on my lap.

"I'm going back to her after I leave here," I said. "We both know this wasn't going to go anywhere passed where it is."

I could tell she was crying. Her breathing had quickened. She was sniffing.

"Nelina has my baby, Carmen?"

She lifted her head and stared at me with liquid eyes. "M'ap pote."

I look at her as if she is lying. Women often fake things like that to keep men.

"It's for me?"

What?

"Is it for me? Am I the only one that comes here late nights to visit you?"

She shifted her body onto my right leg then punched me in the chest.

"What's wrong with you?"

She punched me again, then she pushed herself up, using my thights for leverage. "I'm not stupid like Nelina, she said. I don't need you. Get out."

First you say…

"Get out, you stupid sonofabitch."

I had spent the entire night there trying to make her understand that I had not been using her. Carmen didn't want to hear it. In the end, she told me that she didn't want me, and that the baby she had inside her didn't need me, either.

"I don't want to have to talk about this again," Nelina said when I came into the room. "Not in my own goddamned house, Mario."

I looked at her but said nothing. I was going to be late for work.

"Why do you keep asking me this stupid question anyway."

"Nelina, you are the one…"

"You left here last night, Mario, because you thought… you had it in your mind. Until you can respect me and believe my word, I don't have to be here. You could be happy with your mother and your sister. That's what they want, right?"

Nelina made me sick with her irrationality. She never wasted time with anything, or waited. When a notion was in her head, she just ran away with it. When she had it in her head to do something, she didn't hesitate. She was already packing clothes. I hadn't noticed it before, but there were two bags already set on the floor near the door.

"If you can't accept your won son, I can't expect you to take me In your house, and I can't expect you to raise my daughter."

And just like that, my women left me standing alone in a room that I rented off of Shirley Street, on a Bahamian woman's property.

I remember when Manman told Papa that Nesha was not his child.

My parents were not living together then, but Papa came by every Saturday to visit with us. And both he and Manman seemed comfortable with the arrangement they had set up.

Papa was much shorter than my mother, who bag then was round and big from carrying eight children. The first three were for a man who had died before I was born. Then there was Jean-Pierre, who left after the next three were born, and Papa, who had stuck around-and conceived with my mother, me, my younger brother Armond and presumably, my sister. That was until she told him: "Nishette is not for you."

I remember that she was upset for some reason, that her eyes were deep red, and that the tears would not fall.

Papa didn't retaliate, he didn't argue, he just nodded his head, crushed, defeated.

"When me and you started this, when I began to tell the world, all of Saint Louis, that you were my woman now, they laughed at me. Tony, you are stupid, man, to take a woman with so many children."

Papa just sat there, delivering his final words to Manman as if delivering some sort of monologue on a stage. His head hung limp on his shoulders, as if his neck were too weak to bear it. His eyes were downcast, too ashamed, I guess, to look at his woman, or his children. Too ashamed to bear the site of anyone at that moment of humiliation.

"But me and you, I thought, me and you were not like all of them other times when you were younger. But me, I think maybe I was just stupid. I should have listened."

Manman seemed unfazed by his ranting. She stood in the center of the living room, staring past him to the street outside to the bustling, yet lazy Saint Louis de Nor. To Madame Roger sweeping dust off of her front porch and to the group of boys chasing a worn soccer ball down the road.

"Now I'm happy I never moved here. Now I'm happy I had my own place, so I wouldn't have to move my things in front of the whole town. And have to hear people telling me that htye knew what you'd do to me."

Manman cocked her head in his direction, acknowledging him finally after what seemed like an eternity. "What do you want from me, Tony."

She kept her eyes to the street outside, to the world moving on while we sat there in that moment that would remain frozen in time in my mind.

"You want me to lie to you? She's not yours. She belongs to Posner Joissaint. And don't just sit there like that crying in my head. That's why I can't deal with you. All this time you act like you're the woman. You let everyone walk all over you, then you cry like a little girl. I can't raise my son with you. You poor, you don't have any backbone in you."

Papa was crying. I remember that distinctly. He tried to sniff the tears away but they traveled down the bridge of his nose and dropped to the soiled carpet.

"You never loved me? No… no you didn't because all you know is sex and laying on your back."

Papa stood up, he kissed my forehead, and hugged Armond and Nesha. He tried to hug Manman, but she slapped him; he stumbled backwards.

"If you want it like that, you have it like that."

Papa came for me and Armand a week later. Manman didn't fight him this time, because he didn't come alone. She just sat there on the porch sucking on a cigar. She barely acknowledged us when came over to her to say goodbye.

"I worked his land until I was sixteen. Then I took a camion bus to the city and hopped on the first boat to Nassau, where I found Nesha. When I got there, Nesha introduced me to her sepia-skinned cousin with the clear eyes and a shape that could make any man drop to his knees."

Manman was pleased when I told her Nelina had gone to stay with Thealine that day.

We were sitting on the front porch of one of our relative's house. Manman had refused to stay with me, since she believed our house was not pure.

It was late evening and the sky was red with the falling sun and perfumed with the scent of boiling meat.

Manman's body seemed melting into the rocking chair; the sweat poured from her skin and soaked her flimsy dress.

"She said she's coming back, or you say you going after her?"

She tilted her cup into her mouth and sipped slowly on the iced-water. She looked in my direction then let out a sigh, then a cluck.

"You think this is funny, ma?"

"Nothing's funny in life, boy. Nelina not the only woman outside claiming she has a baby for you. But she's the only one I don't trust. She and that family. You know what they were saying about her when she left Ayiti? They said she was loose."

"They said she was a tramp. Then when I heard you were with her, people started laughing behind my back. They started saying that you were just like… Lord god help him, that's all I could say for you."

She took another sip of water. A piece of ice slipped into her mouth; she let it slide back into the cup.

"You don't know that Paul is not for me."

"I never said he wasn't. "

"But you kept saying…"

"All I said was that baby didn't take anything from my people. I wanted you to think, boy. I saw that baby in that woman's arms. Then I looked at it and I looked at you and I thought…"

"You said…"

"I didn't say anything."

"You couldn't stand Nelina, Manman. You didn't like her just because of her name, and because of what other people said about her."

"No. I wanted you to remember what I tried to teach you before that man took you and turned you into a woman. When you go fishing, you don't just grab the first fish that gets on your line. You keep that fish in the bucket, but you keep fishing. You get more fish until the bucket is full. Or you go until you can't go anymore. You are a man, Mario."

She dropped a lazy hand on my knee."You are young, You have to live life. Don't tie yourself to women you can't trust, boy."

I shook my head.

"No, what?"

"You don't know Nelina, Manman."

"I don't want to know her."

"You don't have to know her. You don't have to love her.
Manman smiled at me. She took another sip of water."

"Then maybe you need to be with that woman and stop listening to your stubborn old mother. Ou sensive pou mwen. Sa se ou bel bagay. But you're a man. Don't let women tell you what your supposed to do."

Manman peeled herself out of her seat and bent over to place a wet kiss on my forehead.

"Tell her come see me before I go back to Haiti. This place is too much for me."

She shuffled herself into the house and let the screen door slamb shut after her.

Thealine rested herself on the doorpost ans accepted my kiss by tilting her head to one side.

Since she had put Christophe out on the street, she was looking better, had gained some weight, was smiling more.

"You good?"

"If you've come to take that nagging girl home, and if you ready to stop all that foolish talk, them I'm okay, mon." She always said "mon," like the Bahamians.

I placed another kiss on her cheek and poked her belly with my thumb.

"Don't worry about me and Nelly. Just worry about all those plantains you been eating."

Thea slapped my arm playfully.

"How you worrying about my belly when you got Nelly and Carmen to worry about?"

I put my lips a breath away from her ear.

"You stop worrying about things you don't understand."

"I understand Mario got a whole bunch of women. But I also understand that the mother of his baby has been in my house all day complaining about him. And I also understand that my back is not good to be sleeping on no floor, child."

I brushed passed her and into the house. Thea caught my arm.

"I hope you come take her home, mon, and stop this garbage."

"Don't worry about Nelly and me."

"Si ou pwan petite la, pa mande li mem kekson tigarson a."

"I won't ask her about the baby, Nelly."

Marie-Louise ran across the room and clamped onto my right leg. Her hair was a curly mess, braided on one side of her head, but tangled and undone on the other.

"Papi come to take us home, mummy."

"You happy to see me because you don't want to comb your hair?"

I scooped her up in my arms.

Nelina was sitting up in Thealine's bed, surrounded by Thea's children and holding Paul in her lap. He was a pink bundle, with bright shining eyes like his mother, and a cup of braided strands.

"Y'all gone home tonight, Tant Nelly," one of Thea's girls asked, calling her "Tant" which is short for matante or auntie. She wasa pudgy little girl with a single ponytail on the top of her head. She had big brown eyes and long lashes.

"I don't know if I'm going anywhere," Dominque said.

She glanced up at me-to acknowledge me there-then turned her attention back to the children around her, to the boy in her lap.

"You going to stand there with Marie-Louise or you going to kiss your boy?"

I put Marie-Louise down, then kissed Nelina's cheek. She put Paul in my arms.

He smelled like a baby usually did after a bath, like powder and milk.

"I'm not mad at you, Mario." Nelina pulled Marie-Louise to her as she spoke. The girl tried to struggle free. Nelina smacked her thigh; Marie-Louise looked up at me for help, but I ignored her. She sobbed softly while Nelina finished braiding her hair. "I'm not mad at you because I know how men are. They like to have their fun. They like to run away when things get serious."

"I don't want to run from you, Nelly."

"You accused me. And you said…"

Marie-Louise tried to struggle free again. Nelina slapped her thigh again.

"I'm gone call the the police for you, Mummy. They're going to send you back to Haiti."

Nelina smacked the girl again, this time lightly on the lips.

"Shut up, Lou-Lou… When I'm finished with her, we'll go home and we will talk. I don't want to make noise in Thealine's house."

"No noise, here," Thealine said coming into the room. "Pwan tout bay say lakay nou." Take all of that stuff to your own house.

"Tant Thea," Marie-Louise whispered.

"Shut up, Lou-Lou." Nelina smacked her thigh and pulled her hair.

Thealine's children laughed. Their mother ushered them out of the room.

I sat down on the bed in front of Nelina and put Paul on my lap.

"If you stop thinking about how mummy pulls your hair when she combs it, it won't hurt so much," I said to Marie-Louise. She sniffed larim and wiped her eyes.

"Now you want to be someone's father?"

"I'm right here."

"For who?"

"For my girls… and for my son."

Nelina continued to braid the girl's hair silently for some long moments. She'd stopped squirming and now only sniffed silently, accepting her fate.

"Who knows. Maybe you might make a good man," Nelina said finally.

She smiled at me and at Paul.

And for the first time, I noticed how the light shone on her honey brown skin and the way the sweat glistened just so.

When she smiled, tiny lines formed on the corner of her mouth and her eyes squinted, almost closing.

"Why are you staring at me?"

I shook my head. There was nothing more to say, nothing that I could express to her in words. Or ever would.

Copyright 2001 Gariot Louima